Officials strip Mark Twain's library at Kensal Rise like thieves in the night

They came in the middle of the night and took the last of the books from the shelves of the library at Kensal Rise, in the Labour-run council of Brent Borough. They stripped the last vestiges of the library being a place of books. It was an act of vandalism. They stole the books. They took away the furniture. They removed the plaque commemorating the opening of the library in 1900 by Mark Twain. There was nothing educational, noble or inspiring about these actions. They may have been inspired by the goal of achieving budgetary cuts in services, but their consequence was no different from other acts of corporate theft or vandalism. They ensured the destruction in Kensal Rise of a tradition of librarianship going back more than a hundred years.
Writers including Alan Bennett, Sir Michael Holroyd and Philip Pullman, as well as local residents, have campaigned against the closure of Kensal Rise public library. Michael Frayn, the novelist and playwright, said: 'So the library is now an unlibrary, in the way that people became unpersons in the darkest days of the Soviety Union. I hope they took the titles of the books off as well. Removing unbooks from an unlibrary - who could possible object?' (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/may/29/kensal-rise-library-stripped-books)